A reader asks: "Can someone comment on the legality of using my brother's old Snow Leopard DVD to install OS X? My brother has Lion, so why can't he choose to give it to me? It doesn't violate Apple's 1 license per 1 computer policy."

I really don't think that Apple give a crap what hardware you, as an individual, run Mac OS X on.

The only scenario where they do care is if somebody tries to commercially resell computers running Mac OS X.

Apple puts restrictions on their license to say "only run this on genuine Apple hardware" because they don't want to open themselves to having to offer support to people attempting to run OS X on non-Apple hardware.

Yes, there are technical hurdles to installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware. That's down to the fact that Apple doesn't need to support anything besides the hardware they have manufactured. That's not malice, just practical reality - they're not going to spend thousands of engineering hours to support hardware they've never shipped.

Apple has never bothered to put any kind of technological restrictions on the installation of Mac OS X. There has never been any copy protection or license codes. They are completely aware that Mac owners regularly and routinely "pirate" major updates of OS X. The only thing they have done to tackle this issue is to radically reduce the price of their OS upgrades.

History has clearly shown that Apple will do nothing at all to try to stop individuals from installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware.

Well said. My take on it is similar: Apple doesn't necessarily like that you put OS X on your generic PC, but they're not going to waste time and money trying to stop you. It's been my experience that Hackintoshers generally tend to already own at least one Mac, and even if they don't, they might eventually get frustrated with the whole process and buy the real thing.

Apple has mostly been a hardware vendor, writing great software in order to sell their hardware for profit. They also make lots of money from iTunes, which just so happens to run on their "competitor's" OS, and probably makes them more money than iTunes users on their own OS.

It's the Psystars of the world they want to quash, as they cut into one of Apple's real money makers: Hardware sales. Why buy a $3000 Mac Pro when you can get more or less equivalent performance for $1000 and still run OS X? That scares them, and they take action at that point. Again though, they never went after the Psystar customers, just the company itself.

“It's the Psystars of the world they want to quash, as they cut into one of Apple's real money makers: Hardware sales.“

Correct, but just because you want something, it doesn‘t mean you have the grounds to do it. If you sell a mac clone without an OS, and in countries where the DMCA doesn‘t apply (somehow making a mac clone violates the DMCA, don‘t ask why i don‘t know), on what grounds can Apple get you? None.